I steamed through about two years of war and more than 100 pages last night. Normally, I don’t read nonfiction because it bores the life out of me, but I have been completely drawn into Grossman’s war notebooks. They’re so full of sketches of Red soldiers and vignettes of battle, it’s like I’m one of those Russian citizens who fervently read Krasnaya Zvezda for news of what was going on at the front. Grossman has been dead for more than forty years, and the war has been over for more than 60 years, but his words are so evocative that it’s like he’s still a war correspondent.
Grossman also covered the discovery and liberation of Majdanek and Treblinka. As I was reading his description of what he found there, I wondered–as I always do when I read about concentration camps and the Holocaust–why I couldn’t stop myself from reading about the horrors of the camp. As I was thinking about this, I came across this passage:
“Someone might ask: ‘Why write about this, why remember all that?’ It is the writer’s duty to tell terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat.” (301)
One thing that really got to me during these chapters was the fact that the Soviet authorities didn’t want people to know what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish populations of the occupied territories. The editors of the text wrote that the Soviets didn’t want the Jews to be singled out as “special victims.” And they also didn’t want people to know how much collaboration went on between the Nazis and the Ukrainians in their territory.
So only a few of Grossman’s pieces on Majdanek and Treblinka got published in his paper. But Grossman found other avenues. His piece, “The Hell Called Treblinka,” was actually quoted during the Nuremburg Trials.
*****
There are less that 50 pages left of A Writer at War. So, I’ll probably be in Berlin with the Red Army by the end of the day.